Primates go gaga for booze, study says Scientists study how humans began craving alcohol

Humans aren’t the only animals able to appreciate a stiff drink. According to a new study, slow lorises and aye-ayes seek out the most alcoholic nectar available when presented with a choice.

Slow lorises and aye-ayes happen to share the genetic mutation that humans and other great apes use to metabolize alcohol more effectively.

There are other animals that seek out alcoholic nectars for their superior caloric contents, but humans and some other apes have a fairly unusual tendency to seek out the state of drunkenness for its own sake.

Scientists want to better understand how we evolved to crave this, so they’re looking to animals who share the mutation but party a little less hard than we do to see what they might use it for.

“Aye-ayes are essentially primate woodpeckers,” Dartmouth’s Nathaniel Dominy, who oversaw the new research, said in a statement. The strange-looking Madagascar natives use their alien-like fingers to tug grubs out of trees, which doesn’t give them much call to metabolize ethanol.

But Dominy and his colleagues suspect that a local plant called the traveler’s tree — the nectar of which becomes a significant food source for aye-ayes during some seasons — might be naturally fermented.

Slow lorises are already consume alcoholic nectars.

The study published last week in Royal Society Open Science doesn’t examine aye-aye nectar itself.

But by showing that the genetic adaptation to digest alcohol extends to a desire to consume it, the study suggests that the animals can or do have some kind of alcoholic delicacy on their dinner menu.

In a small experiment led by Dominy’s student Samuel Gochman, the researchers presented three animals — two aye-ayes and a slow loris — with a multiple-choice feeding test.

They prepared ersatz nectar with varying concentrations of alcohol, then arranged the drinks — along with some tap water as a control — randomly in accessible containers.

Once a day for several days, the animals were led to the array of drink choices one by one and allowed to pick their preference.

Not only did the primates avoid tap water when given alcoholic nectar as an alternative, but the animals also sought out the most alcoholic brews available.

The animals also kept returning to pots of booze they’d already emptied, eager to drink more.

“Aye-ayes used their fingers to compulsively probe the cups long after the contents were emptied, suggesting that they were extremely eager to collect all residual traces,” Dominy told New Scientist.

But they didn’t get drunk, likely thanks to the genetic mutation they share with humans and the intelligence they don’t.

More research is needed to follow up on the results. known to